Desertification, main challenges ahead of Int'l communities
Desertification is of main challenges the international communities is mired in and counted as the major threat to ecosystems and human life.
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Of main challenges facing the international communities is desertification held as the major threat to ecosystems and human life. That's a reason why different countries should place combatting the setback high on their agenda, reported Taqrib News Agency (TNA).
Desertification as a global problem brings widespread negative consequences and fallouts whose degree is, obviously enough, different based on economic system of each country.
This phenomenon, along with the standing penury, leads to the destruction of the world's pastures and loss of soil productivity in arid lands.
loss of groundwater in the aquifers, loss of soil fertility, damages to vegetation, vulnerability of lands, flooding, dust and air pollution along with its consequences, penury, unemployment and standing hurdles in promoting and bettering deprived areas are of main fallouts of desertification.
The phenomenon occurs thereafter severe drought and famine breeding serious global setbacks in undeveloped countries; given that, the United Nations General Assembly in 1974 approved a resolution based on which attention were drawn to the necessity of countering this devastating
phenomena.
Given that foresaid lines, the convention was adopted on 17 June 1994 by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for the elaboration of an international convention to combat desertification in some countries experiencing serious drought and desertification, particularly in Africa.
Great steps have been taken and measures carried out in four continents of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe which included preparing plan and implementing the programs for combatting desertification.
Climate change is not equally felt across the globe, and neither are its longer term consequences.
Desertification now coursing through many a country poses an immediate crisis of vast proportions. But underlying today's tragedy is a more deep- seated problem that threatens the future of arid lands throughout the world.
It is desertification, the insidious, spreading process that is turning many of the world's marginal fields and pastures into barren wastelands, unable to support the people and animals living on them.
Seven years ago a United Nations conference, responding to an earlier drought that had laid waste people, plants and animals in a wide belt of Africa south of the Sahara, adopted a sweeping plan to reverse desertification and halt the process completely by the year 2000.
Desertification, a process in which the biological productivity of the land is sharply degraded by human abuse and natural factors, is an important underlying cause of the famine that has killed hundreds of thousands of Africans in recent years. It is often overlooked by commentators who focus on the immediate cause of the current famine, a prolonged drought that has withered crops and deprived cattle, goats and camels of their grazing vegetation.
Desertification describes a wide range of ecological changes that degrade the land. In some cases, the term refers to degradation severe enough to produce a desert. But in most cases, it simply means a sharp loss of productivity.
